Like most parents who are just trying to get a meal on the table with their souls intact, the words “Can I help cook?” from my children send a shudder up my spine. Or, well, they used to. My oldest, Phoebe, is now 11, and the concept of “help” no longer means: slowing down the entire endeavor while Mom is completely in the zone and can’t you just let me be a control freak right now? “Help” actually translates to helpful things, like whisking vinaigrettes, assembling salads, planning a menu, caramelizing onions, setting the table, pouring milk, and mixing spices and ground meat together to make (then fry) homemade sausages for breakfast sandwiches.

But best of all, it translates to independent baking. Baking at a certain age becomes a parent’s best friend. Sure, there is the inevitable tornado of flour that ensues, and I’m still finding chocolate chips under the refrigerator from five months ago–after one of my daughters’ friends tried to pop open a bag of Ghirardelli nuggets in her own very special way. But unlike sautéing and mincing and stirring hot things into even hotter pots, baking (which is to say mixing, pouring, dumping) does not require a whole lot supervision. The most dangerous part (at least the low-degree-of-difficulty baking I favor) is placing a dish or tray inside a hot oven, then removing it. I make sure to point out the potholders before retiring to the living room to catch up on my Meg Wolitzer reading.

Baking at this age is like the best babysitter ever. It’s fun, precise, and instructional. With its authoritative rules and exact measurements, it’s the culinary response to the developmental concept that “Kids Crave Structure.” And I’m utterly useless when it’s taking place. Having actually studied fractions in school, Phoebe doesn’t need me to give her a review course on the measuring cup ring. (Like she did at age 7 when she ended up adding 12 teaspoons of baking powder to the cookie batter instead of 1/2 teaspoon.) At four feet six inches, she can reach the flour and sugar from their perches atop the counter, the milk from the highest shelf of the fridge, and the vanilla extract from the upper cabinet, without pinballing the little Ikea stool all around the kitchen. More important, without asking me a single question.

Last year, in an effort to exercise my daughters’ self-sufficiency muscles (or maybe I should say in an effort to locate them), I told the girls that they could bake anything they wanted, whenever they wanted. They didn’t even have to ask my permission.

Initially I had them select baking box mixes during our weekly grocery shop. (The all-natural offerings seem to have improved significantly since the days I’d bake brownies “from scratch” using a box of Duncan Hines, squeezing the accompanying “chocolate flavor packet” into the dusty mix.) We started with boxes because they were self-contained projects that yielded predictable results. But pretty soon, Phoebe graduated to from-scratch baking. In fact, she even started building her play dates around concocting chocolate waffles, blueberry muffins, stained glass Christmas cookies, nutmeg-spiked apple pies. She and her friend Ella, another kitchen enthusiast, would actually trade e-mails linking to cookie recipes they wanted to try next. Planning and e-mailing being two more tasks an 11-year-old can do that I had never banked on. Maybe one day she’ll become a control freak just like her mother.

And what would Jenny like Phoebe to make her this Sunday? “She’s never made Alison Roman’s crazy delicious brownies before, but I really wish she would,” she says. “They are hands-down my most favorite.”